Could a President Who Locks Immigrant Children in Dog Cages and ICE Boxes Suspend the Constitution and Declare Martial Law? Roger Algase

I am postponing my August "vacation" from commenting about the immigration policies of our nation's Chief Executive by one day in order to share a frightening July 30 article by Thom Hartman on alternet.org suggesting that Donald Trump might very well at some point suspend all freedom in America by declaring martial law, "postponing" the 2020 election, defying the courts and assuming full powers of a dictator, based on the template of the way he has been treating immigrants.

What makes this article so frightening is that it is based on an interview with Tony Schwartz who ghost wrote Donald Trump's book Art ofthe Dead, spent a good deal of Time with Trump and knows him well. As the article explains in chilling detail, Trump has a dictator's ambitions, and his authoritarian use of power against brown immigrants could be only the beginning of what he might have in store for all Americans as well. The link is:

I of course agree that no child should ever die as a result of being in immigration custody no matter who the president is. Nor have I ever claimed that Trump is the first or only president to have been in office while immigrants were being abused.

The difference is that, according to news reports which I refer to in my previous comments, including but not limited to a Huffington Post report of court affidavits alleging that CBP agents are force-feeding drugs to children and making teenage girls strip naked in front of guards, see:

In a May 23 article which can be accessed through Google (I do not have a link), Antonio Olivo of the Washington Post reports that, according to the ACLU, there were allegedly widespread, horrifying abuses committed against unaccompanied minors from Central America and elsewhere under the Obama administration, involving thousands of children, as shown in 30,000 documents. Olivo writes that, according to the allegations, the children were:"...repeatedly beaten, sexually abused, and deprived of food and medical care by federal border agents."

In the same article, he states:
"U.S. Customs and Border Protection Agents allegedly used stun guns on the minors for amusement or punishment, kicked them and threatened to rape or kill them. The ACLU report...says agents routinely kept minors in detention cells with frigid temperatures, forcing them to sleep on concrete floors"

If there is any truth at all to these allegations, then Obama is just as big a criminal as Trump allegedly is and they both belong in jail for violating US and international laws against torture, as well as in the lowest circle of Hell.

I am not a philosopher and cannot make a moral judgment as to who is worse, Obama for pretending to respect justice and human rights while these atrocities were allegedly going on, or Trump for reveling in equally horrific alleged violence, hatred, bigotry and abuse against young children whose only "crime" was that they had brown skin and were nit from "Countries like Norway".

But the great majority of us, including myself, should have paid more attention to what was going on during the Obama years, and I personally apologize for and regret the fact that I did not.

Does this past history in any way excuse or mitigate the horrors that Trump is allegedly inflicting on immigrant children now, or his clear and present danger to the future of America's freedom and democracy?

Of course not. Donald Trump is the president of the United States now. Barack Obama is not. No matter how horrible Obama's abuses of innocent immigrants children may allegedly have been in the past, they are not excuses for the ones that Trump is allegedly carrying out now.